Blog

TL;DR: App broken, fix coming this weekend. AdSense API we were using has been replaced by a newer version. App will be updated this weekend with fixes and new features. In the meantime, use the Google Adsense app in the Android Market.

So since I write that last message, I found myself with an unusual job offer; I left the AdSense team in London, which I've been on for years, and moved to Mountain View to run the Display portion of the AdWords frontend and help advertisers make sense of our display ads business.

So my life has been a bit upside-down lately, and that's meant I've had very little time to launch the version of the app that wouldn't have broken when the rest of the AdSense API team did their launch. Most of my life is still in boxes, there's IKEA furniture stacked in little flat-pack cardboard boxes in our new house in Noe Valley, and the dog sees me for about three hours a day.

None of those things are excuses for having failed to deliver you an update, but I hope they go some way into explaining why it didn't happen in time.

I'm very sorry the AdSense Dashboard isn't working for you today. I'm going to fix this very soon - this weekend - and will iterate a few times over the weekend to clean up a few long-standing bugs and handle a few errors and crashes that the occasional person has reported.

Now, it's important to state clearly that this app isn't going to live forever. I really want everyone to migrate to the official app - I worked hard to get approval for that team to get officially sanctioned and to build the best possible user experience for you and the rest of our AdSense users, and they're working hard to build out a fantastic feature set, and already has features I don't offer, like notifications. If that app has the feature set you're happy with, switch now; if it doesn't, tell them what you most wish it had by providing feedback on the app, which they're watching closely.

I miss my old team. I'm so proud of the app they've built, and the UX team has done an amazing job of making something not just functional but beautiful. Now's a great time to go and try their app - again, if you haven't used it recently - and remind yourself of what having full time engineering on making a great user experience can achieve, rather than some guy in his 20% time.

I've been getting a lot of reports of problems with the dashboard, and I wanted people to know the status of some of this.

Authentication Problems
There are two things we're looking at; one is a refresh of the app to a more modern set of sdk supports, the other is an investigation into auth problems with the API team.

YouTube Revenue Missing
Yes, YT revenue is missing. YouTube has pulled its data out of AdSense. It's been pointed out to me that I could join the request with API data from the YouTube API that now has it, launched this month. I'll continue to work with the rest of the AdSense team to get this data back into AdSense for all our publishers, and will look at doing this as a stopgap in the meantime.

Have no fear, we'll put humpty dumpty back together again. Thanks for your patience.

We’ve been working through feedback from our users (thanks to everyone who has been leaving feedback, we love you) and have put together a refresh release.

Specifically, we’ll be announcing that this version enables ARC support for AdSense users, something we’ve been looking forward to for some time. If you enable Ad Review Center in AdSense, you’ll be able to block individual ad creatives - finer grained than URL blocking, and not limited in terms of the number you’re allowed to block.

Now you can pick and choose which ads you don’t want to see again without having to bar a whole domain. Domain blocking is still there in the dropdown.

The ARC team is really excited about this feature - we’ve been looking forward to providing this functionality to users from within their sites for a long time, and we’re excited to see it happening in this release.

Last, we’ve taken some of your feedback to heart about overlays and ad notification bars being too intrusive, and we’re working on redesigning and restyling them to be more lightweight and less in-your-face, while maintaining the existing functionality.

We’re launching the new overlay in this release; we think it’s a night-and-day improvement and hope you agree.

As always, please send us feedback.

Ad overlay, normalAd overlay, hover, when an inspector is availableAd overlay for a DART tag

Well, it’s been a long, hard slog, but we’re back with a new release, and support for another Google publisher frontend.

We’ve added support for publishers using the DoubleClick Ad Exchange to use the Google Publisher Toolbar. At the same time, we’ve tried to address some of the top concerns, problems, and feature requests. We’ve added support for viewing details of an impression, and once you’re viewing those details, to block the ad.

To see more information about an ad, just click on any ad inspector that goes blue when you hover over it.

In the real world, publishers use a mix of ad products on their sites; they book direct deals and reservations through DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP), pass their inventory through exchanges like the Google Ad Exchange, or backfill unsold inventory to Google AdSense.

Since my initial launch of the AdSense Publisher Toolbar, we’ve got great feedback - both internally at Google across our publisher teams, and externally from users - and I’ve been very happy with the response so far.

Based on everyone’s feedback, e’ve been hard at work adding support for more products. I’m happy to announce that as of V2.0, we’ve renamed the AdSense Publisher Toolbar to the Google Publisher Toolbar, and added support for basic decoding of all DoubleClick tags. This is the first of many releases to broaden the toolbar to cover all of Google’s publisher products, and we look forward to your feedback.

We’ve been hard at work on the publisher toolbar, and I’m happy to announce that we’ve pushed a new version containing the most commonly requested feature: support for selecting a range other than a 7-day daterange for the custom and URL channel summary.

So as a part of the V1 launch of the API, there are a few things that are happening.

First and foremost, we don’t need to hide the fact that the API exists anymore; this means we can move to OAuth2 for our authentication. This miiiiiiight be a little flaky; I’ll be watching for problems with authentication, and if you have problems, tell me. Also, we’ll be moving to an explicitly read-only auth scope, and a human-readable scope at that, so that users can feel confident that we can’t do anything untoward with their data.

Next, this is the first pass on a multi-pass redesign of the look and feel. Specifically, we’re going to be surfacing a lot more data - so we need ways of making all that data work. As such, we’re moving to ViewPager, the same pager UI you see in Market and Google+.

Gotchas:

Auth might be a little flaky. Working on it.

Graph rendering is really slow, especially now that there are six of them on screen.

There are a lot of UI tweaks needed, here; the app isn’t the prettiest thing in the world.

I’ll continue to work on this over the next few weeks, but again, I’d like to thank everyone for helping us test the AdSense Management API - we wouldn’t have been able to launch it with the level of confidence we have today without each of you.

So the secret can now be told - AdSense Dashboard has been a skunkworks project to test Google’s prototype AdSense API.

Together, we generated enough traffic to verify the production-readiness of the API; thanks for enduring the occasional downtime as we got the API ready for the masses and for its public release, and thanks to the AdSense API team for doing such amazing work under difficult time schedules and a rather large amount of pressure from me on the shape and form of the API.

This isn’t the end of AdSense Dashboard - in fact, it’s just the beginning. But for now, the limelight belongs to our API launch.

If you’d like more information on the API, you’ll find the public documentation is now available. Now that we’re public, I’ll be changing the auth method from ClientLogin (which reported “AdSense” as the permissions it wanted when you attached an account) to the OAuth endpoint for the API, at which point it will tell you that it wants read-only access to the API, further limiting the set of permissible actions that can be taken by the code.

Thanks again to everyone who’s installed the product and helped us test our API.